After watching a few too many Unreal Tournament (UT99) music mixes online I made the probably ill-thought-out decision to rebuild the first PC I built using my own money and hands. I built its predecessor too but that was paid for by my parents since I was only 12 at the time so this one was the first I can call my own.
I still actually own the original case I used so I'm going to re-use it again for this build.
The PC under my desk today can trace its lineage to this original build so having them sat next to one another will be a strange sort of paradox in my mind.
Core: Asus P2B and Pentium 2 400MHz
I looked first for the motherboard and found one listed for auction at a reasonable price paired with the exact CPU I needed, it was due to finish an hour later and had zero bids so I took that as a sign from the retro Gods and bought it for the starting price.
Memory: 64MB SD-RAM
I have SD-RAM in stock but I think they are 256MB modules so I need to see if they will work on this board before looking for something more period appropriate.
HDD: 10.1GB IBM Deathstar
I don't intend on using solid state storage on this build because the experience demands the oldey timey clicks and whirrs. Performance is not a concern, it will be slow and I expect long waits.
I have a collection of old hard drives available to use, I don't have a 10.1GB model available but some of similar vintage have been recently confrmed as working while I disposed of many others that failed testing.
Graphics: Matrox Millenium G200 8MB + Voodoo 2 12MB
The Matrox Millenium G200 was a decent 2D card but had poor 3D performance hence I added the voodoo 2. I own neither of these cards anymore and the oldest GPU I have is a PCI ATI Rage64 which is probably even too old for this project.
I'd like half-decent 3D support but 3DFX hardware is very expensive these days, more than I'm willing to pay, so I might look for something like a Riva TNT2 that had better performance, is period approriate, but is more common so reasonably priced.
Removable media: HP 7200i CD-RW and 3.5" FDD
I nicknamed the HP drive the "coaster maker" because most of the time it suffered the dreaded buffer underrun and lacked "BurnFree" technology that handled this situation, leading to a lot of discarded media. It was also very slow, writing at dual speed it took over half an hour per disc.
I have no warm feelings for the HP drive, but I later replaced this with a Plextor PX-W2410TA that not only do I still own, but it also still works as I burned a disc with it earlier this year. I'll be adding it to this build along with a floppy disk drive, although I don't have any 3.5" diskettes remaining so I may need to pick up a box.
Sound: Creative SoundBlaster Live!
The Asus P2B pre-dates PC-97 onboard sound so I included a SB Live! card which I sadly don't own anymore but I may be able to pick up and intend to look for on the market.
Network: 3COM 3c905
In the late 90's I ran a 10BASE2 Ethernet network so would have used a 10mbit Ethernet card with coaxial support. I don't have a coaxial network today, but I do have a 3c905 Fast Ethernet card which is period appropriate and will provide better performance on my current network.
WiFi is obviously out of the question for this system as it didn't exist at the time.
Software: Windows 98SE
I may have originally installed Windows 95b but later upgraded to Windows 98SE, I haven't used this in a very long time, but it is probably my best choice for the build.
I also later ran Debian 2.2 on this system and it's possible I may recreate that experience.
Summary
I don't know what I'll do with this build yet, as I said it's not well thought out, but I'm excited to re-experience it after nearly 30 years. What I'd like to have done is run SETI-at-home that I was well into from late 1999 on this hardware, but I don't think it is possible to recreate that system. I'd like to spin up older games like Quake 1/2, Unreal/UT99. I don't have a CRT monitor, but I'm tempted to add one when I can create some space for one in my office. At the very least I'll be ready for next year’s old computer challenge using a certainly even more challenging system than this year’s attempt.